UPCOMING EVENTS

Influencer marketing is on the rise, you might have heard. There’s sound logic driving that growth: About 30 percent of consumers are more likely to buy a product recommended by a “non-celebrity blogger,” according to a survey conducted by Collective Bias, and 60 percent of all consumers say they’ve been influenced by a social media post or blog review while shopping. The trouble is, influencers can be tough to find on platforms like Pinterest, where they’re siloed in niche communities that don’t always bubble to the surface.

That’s changing, luckily — at least on Pinterest. Today, the social network rolled out a new API intended to help brands find and keep track of influencers.

Starting this week, Pinterest clients will be able to sort influencers by category and see stats like unique viewers, impressions, and engagement per Pin. Another tool will allow them to surface users’ top-performing content quickly.

“We’re always looking for ways to help businesses extend their reach on Pinterest. We’re excited to make it easier for brands to discover and collaborate with influencers, as well as track their performance on third-party platforms,” David Temple, Pinterest’s head of content and creator products, said. “Creators are essential to Pinterest, and we’re thrilled to provide additional tools and resources for them to leverage as they build relationships with businesses.”

Klear, an influencer marketing company based in Tel Aviv, is among the first to be granted access to the new API. Guy Avigdor, chief operating officer of Klear, said that more than 90 percent of Pinterest users say Pinterest has helped them make a purchase decision.

“With over 250 million people on Pinterest each month, there is a unique and timely opportunity for brands to reach consumers,” said Avigdor. “Every piece of content generated by influencers on Pinterest will be automatically tracked, attributed, and aggregated, including top-level KPIs and the impact of each influencer. Pinterest is an important influencer domain to manage, and we expect brands to be excited about the ability to run entire Pinterest influencer marketing campaigns from start to finish — all within one platform.”

Other new partners are OpenInfluence, Hypr, AspireIQ, Mavrck, Izea, Influence.co and Obvious.ly.

The new API is far from Pinterest’s first dip into influencer marketing waters. In November 2016, it launched the Pin Collective, a network of external influencers who work with brands to develop creative, and in September 2017 debuted a custom tool that automates companies’ Promoted Pins campaigns with content creators. And this summer in June, it hosted inaugural creator conferences in San Francisco, UK, and France.

Driving the algorithms that underlie those tools is data — lots of data. To date, Pinterest users have pinned more than 100 billion images across 175 billion pins and organized them into 3 billion collections, called boards in Pinterest parlance.

“We’re truly a big data company — our scale is just tremendous,” Pinterest chief technology officer Vanja Josifovski said onstage at VentureBeat’s AI Summit in August. “Each [pin] is basically an image and text. People curate this content into boards, and those boards reflect very fine refinement of people’s tastes. We have 3 billion descriptions of things people like together.”

Pinterest isn’t the only social platform trying to better leverage influencers. In February, Snap launched Snapchat Storytellers, a program that connects brands with influencers for content collaborations. In June, Facebook unveiled Brand Collabs Manager, a search engine that aims to connect marketers with influencers. And in April, Twitter launched Creator Originals, a content program that lets marketers sponsor non-branded video with in-stream or pre-roll ads.